I found this fragment after forgetting about it for over a year. It was an interesting Jewish verse rational, confused man verse vampire story that I gave up on. I might return to it. It has some interesting themes that I think are worth exploring.

“The world cries around us, the tears reeking of the blood of babies commingled with the toxic substances that escape our metropolises. What we—that is, the man there, the woman here, me, you—what we do effects everything around us. We splash water on our faces and join the masses with our hypocrisy scribbled on signs that we strain to hold high enough to be seen as we parade through the streets. Oh, yes, I’m talking about us. We are the bringer of this emptiness, this strip mall society that desires everything and once it gets something, doesn’t want it anymore.

“Our lives are lived in a uniform, unknowable world. It is a world of isolation where your conduct affects you and how people feel about themselves. You are not ruled by rational thought. Evolution has not raised you from the animals but cast you to the devils.

Charles sat alone at the table with five people after finishing his reading. He had spent the last thirty minutes spitting into the microphone words of disdainful dejection to an audience that he had saturated with more spittle than truth. They hadn’t understood the difference. His neighbors were all acquaintances he had not invited and whose presence provided him with no comfort. They had seen the flyers the bar had plastered around town advertising his harangues.

At various times during his association with each of them, they had confided in him how they commiserated and approved of his words, feeling close to him and seeing in him a mirror for their own conception of themselves. Each time he had this conversation, he listened and validated their feelings, telling each how they alone reminded me of his best friend from childhood who he had confided all of his secret desires and wishes in, and whose untimely death in a hunting incident, which a jury had found accidental by a single vote, had left him cold and emotionally unresponsive until they had come along. He had lied, of course. The jury had convicted the hunter of manslaughter and he had spent ten years in prison.

A man pulled up a chair next to Charles. A red-faced butch, who took her place behind the microphone, removed bundles of loose-leaf paper from her oversized bag and swiped at the cigarette smoke that still filled the stage. Charles had used the smoke to emphasize particularly pungent statements and enjoyed the morphing eddies that floated below the black ceiling lit by the brilliant spotlights.

“It curdles my throat,” the man said. “Your emptiness does. I feel it tingling through my curled-up toes, screaming to me, vibrating the very air that surrounds you.”

Charles laughed a deep, hollow laugh. “You almost sound like you believe that. I know rubbish. Rubbish is what I trade in. Did you catch me up there? Do not try to sell manure to a cow farmer.” The people at the table turned and listened expectantly, ignoring the sweating woman on stage.

“If you could only see what I see,” the man said. “The truth as I know the truth, not the shadows but the actual forms dancing by the light, then you would understand. It is in you already, this truth, saturating your pores, but you hang by your white knuckled fingertips to false realities that can’t support your weight,”

His tone was hypnotic and Charles lost himself in the realization of each word. They resonated sweetly off the man’s red, red lips before solidifying and gliding delicately toward Charles’s face. Charles mouth opened of its own volition and he tasted the words. They dissolved on his tongue, their texture and flavor saturating his mouth and piercing the terrible loneliness and darkness that defined him.

Charles shook him off. “I like the twist of your words, friend. You sound almost as desperate as I feel, and your voice, your voice is almost electrifying. I am Charles.” Charles reached out his hand and the man grasped him, it was a cold, clammy grasp.

“When there’s nothing that you believe in, that nothingness swallows you whole. Your insides die in an outward spiral

We’re not what you think.

He left. I shivered in the terrible heat of the day wearing a shirt drenched from the humidity that had sucked the water from my body and had left me shriveled and bent. His offer blazed through my mind ricocheting through the hollow spaces. Immortality!

that leaves you a dead specimen wandering the streets. We work in the night, but not the night most people think. It is the night of the soul, the place you look for answers and listen as only darkness responds. That’s what you don’t understand about us. We are hunters and killers, but there’s nothing supernatural about us. If there was, I wish every day that there were something, anything, supernatural because that would prove that there is something beyond us.

Faith feels like this: emptiness. When there’s nothing you believe in, there are times when that nothingness swallows you whole. your insides die and you feel the organs surrounding your hollow stomach dying in a sick, outward spiral until you’re nothing but a dead specimen wandering the streets looking for victims. You suck the marrow out of the victim’s bones and show them the emptiness. It is a disease that I pass on, but it’s different from what you imagine.

It started years ago, this disease. It’s spread by looking for a cure—the cure, or the treatment, is found by passing it on to others. You suck, their vitality and beliefs, questioning each one until there is nothing in them left. That’s the cure and the curse. Healthy people need not worry, but there are no healthy people. We work in the night, but no the night most people think of. We work in the night of the sould, the place where you look for answers and only darkness responds. That’s what you don’t understand about us. We are hunters and killers, but there’s nothing supernatural about us. If there was, I wish every day that there were something, anything, supernatural because that would prove that there is something beyond us.

It curdles my throat, your loneliness. I have felt it in my curled-up toes. Darkness cannot be kept away because it is all that exists. If there existed more we could not prowl. Who would let us? Who would let our dark clad.

I fought the self-loathing that welled up inside, and lost.

The end finds Charles, cald in black, talking privately to the Rabbi, using the same first line that the vampire used on him.

Sex is better than chocolate. Not the good, European chocolate, just the American type. There are chocolates that are better than cocaine, not that I would know what those drugs taste like, but you get the idea. I’m only talking about the American type. You know, Hershey’s, Nestlé’s, etcetera.

The Rabbi’s scraggly beard captivated Charles. It defined his entire face, a face that otherwise lacked structure and weight. His beard moved with his triangular jaw, none of the hairs moving individually. His eyes were tiny through the thick glass lenses.

“Today’s lesson,” the Rabbi said, “relates to the interconnection of the Jewish people and

Do you think she’s looking at me?

It all started with a scraggly beard.

Scraggly beards. That’s what he would always remember from his classes. Whoever thought that a singles, religious class would be a good place to meet women was insane.

The Rabbi’s scraggly beard stuck out in all directions. It fascinated Charles. He tried to imagine what it would like when the Rabbi woke up in the morning.

Charles had seen scraggly beards like his before on homeless people.

“You piss-ant!” Sunglasses said. “You dare question my faith. It is not something you can understand or argue. Your logic, while perhaps persuasive and corner painting, in the end, does not get you anywhere. Who created you? Where did you come from? God himself did, and then he came down and gave us the answers and you, you, you tyrant of small minds, you hide behind your logic games and dare question his words.”

The room quieted after Sunglasses finished. Charles glanced around and grinned. It had had its desired effect. Everyone was silent and looking away. Triumphant. He had hoped to open a tiny gash in Sunglasses’s belief, but this went beyond anything he could have imagined.

“How dare you,” Sunglasses said. He attempted to stand up quickly, a difficult feat since the arms of the chair and wooden table connected to the chair prevented such fast motion, and the chair came up with him. He pushed the chair and table down to the ground and twisted his weight trying to throw it against the wall. The table turned and squeaked on the floor a few feet away from him. He glared at it and took a step toward the table before turning on Charles.

Charles taught himself to smile at girls. The smile is the first line of communication. Charles practiced his smile in front of the mirrors for hours in an attempt to develop an acceptable smile. He decided that his teeth looked best in good light, and, if the light was not good, it was best to keep his lips closed. A good smile is what first catches the attention of a girl. If he smiles at her, she might smile back, and the exchange of smiles gives him the green light to talk to her. Smiling was more difficult than he thought. He spent thirty minutes exercising his face muscles, which, surprisingly, must be developed before they effectively get across the intended emotion.

New people scared Charles.

Emotions were another thing that concerned him. He thought that life was defined by rational thought. The realization that there was more to life than his logic could explain concerned him. He had thought that emotions were just barriers to rational thought. It took him a while to accept that they changed him and affected his move more strongly than any rational thought did. If a girl happened to smile at him, the change in his mood was intense.

He spoke to groups with firebrand intensity, sharing his dark feelings

He attended the study for the third time in

Speaking to girls has never been my strong point.

What is it about circles and sitting around them?

“Two things made the Jewish religion successful: the one god principle, and the Chosen People. It didn’t capture the convert everyone philosophy that the Catholics perfected, but it did grow based on those principles.

characters: sexual inuendos, trying to be brilliant, rabbi trying to be fair and give everyone time even though he’s dying to dominate the combination, an anti-Jew (that’s you, fool!)